Memorandum submitted by the Campaign for
Science and Engineering in the UK (CaSE)
1. Campaign for Science and Engineering
is pleased to submit this response to the Committee's inquiry
into the Bologna Process. CaSE is a voluntary organisation campaigning
for the health of science and technology throughout UK society,
and is supported by over 1,500 individual members, and some 70
institutional members, including universities, learned societies,
venture capitalists, financiers, industrial companies and publishers.
The views of the membership are represented by an elected Executive
Committee.
THE IMPLICATIONS
OF A
THREE-PHASE
STRUCTURE OF
HIGHER EDUCATION
AWARDS FOR
TO ONE-YEAR
MASTERS AND
SHORT UNDERGRADUATE
COURSES (HNCS,
HNDS, AND
FOUNDATION DEGREES)
2. The Bologna declaration and other ministerial
statements that have followed it seem to have come from largely
uninformed political imperatives on the part of politicians of
various countries, aimed at satisfying their individual aims regarding
public spending pressures rather than at providing international
parity of outcomes at various levels of higher education.
3. Many countries contrasted the length
of their first cycle qualifications with England's three year
bachelor degree and believed that if they cut theirs to the same
length, it would address difficulties over their costs of providing
higher education.
4. However, they did tend to espouse the
3+2+3 model for bachelor's masters and doctorate. This contrasted
with the UK's three or four year bachelor's degree, leading to
a one year postgraduate master's level qualification. In the UK,
entry to PhD level programmes is also much more flexible, with
some people going on directly from a first degree.
5. The UK appeared to ignore the incompatibility
of parts of our system with those of other countries, largely
reacting (in a somewhat smug way) just to those other countries'
desire to align the length of first degrees with ours.
6. This left the UK in a tangle. There would
be enormous implications for the cost of higher education provision
(both for the state and for the student) if we were to align our
system with those of other countries.
7. There are two separate issues here that
should not be conflated. There is nothing in Bologna that prevents
the UK from operating one year postgraduate and short undergraduate
courses. The problem is the nomenclature. We may no longer be
allowed to award a Masters degree after one year of postgraduate
study, or a Bachelor's degree after two years, as for Foundation
Degrees.
8. If we believe these courses are useful
in their present forms, then we should keep them, and if Bologna
makes us change their names, then so be it. At present, for example,
while there are one-year postgraduate diplomas (and, of course,
the one year Postgraduate Certificate in Education) students prefer
to have a Masters degree, especially if some other university
is already offering an MA or MSc for much the same time and effort.
9. If, however, all one year courses led
to a Diploma or Certificate, these would rapidly become standard
and have all the status they needed. It would be quite wrong to
abolish some of these courses or needlessly to extend them to
two years, merely to comply with the Bologna two-year requirement
for a Masters degree, and it is unnecessary—and quite possibly
futile—to try to negotiate exemptions for them. Much the
same applies to the Foundation Degree, HNC and HND.
AWARENESS AND
ENGAGEMENT IN
THE BOLOGNA
PROCESS WITHIN
HEIS
10. For many continental universities, the
most awkward problem they have had to solve is the move to the
three-year first degree. This has not been a problem in the UK,
even in Scotland. Because of this, however, there has been a tendency
not to look carefully enough at the changes that will have to
be made, and this can lead to unnecessary problems. In such situations
as this, it is very important to consult widely and at an early
stage, because any proposed change can cause problems that will
not be anticipated except by people working in the area in which
they will occur.
11. For example, the details of the implementation
of the credit framework were largely left to "credit consortia",
most of whose members were administrators. They imposed the requirement
that students have to pass every module. This seems logical enough
and it is what happens in many other systems, but students in
the UK, especially in science and engineering have not traditionally
been expected to do this, providing they demonstrated overall
competence in their subject. Such students would now be deemed
to have failed.
12. There are a number of ways of avoiding
this outcome while complying with the requirements of a credit
framework, but universities are having to devise them late in
the day and after the details of the framework have been decided.
Naturally, they are not all choosing the same solution. Had there
been more widespread discussion of the Bologna Process at an earlier
stage, a more satisfactory and preferable nationwide scheme could
have been agreed.
OPPORTUNITIES TO
ENHANCE THE
MOBILITY OF
STUDENTS FROM
THE UK
13. The chief barrier to mobility from the
UK is language. Too few UK students can speak a European language
well enough to study in it, and because English is more and more
the international lingua franca, there is a much greater
incentive for others to come to the UK and improve their English
than for UK students to go abroad.
14. There is, however, a need for more UK
graduates to be able to speak other languages, and measures should
be taken to encourage this. The most important would be to improve
and extend language teaching in schools, but universities could
also include more language teaching in undergraduate courses.
15. The greater standardisation of courses
will obviously make it easier for UK students to study abroad.
In particular, it will be easier for them to spend a year or even
a semester in another country. This would also be easier if UK
degrees were less highly specialised than at present; perhaps
the longer time envisaged between the first cycle degree and the
PhD will lead to this.
THE POSSIBLE
IMPLEMENTATION OF
A EUROPEAN
CREDIT TRANSFER
SYSTEM (ECTS) AND
A FOCUS
ON LEARNING
OUTCOMES AND
COMPETENCIES
16. The ECTS is based on the number of hours
of study. This is already causing difficulties in the UK, where
learning outcomes and competencies have always been more important.
The European system is much easier to operate in a very large
and diverse system, but it leads to all sorts of anomalies. How
much this matters depends on how much common sense people and
institutions are prepared to use, and how much they are constrained
by regulations.
17. If, for example, levels of pay are determined
by the level of qualification that a person has, then there will
be an incentive for people to go for those that actually reflect
less in the way of learning outcomes and competences. This would
be rather like the effect of league tables on the choice of GCSEs.
18. This question highlights a possibly
serious problem. The ECTS is based on the number of hours of study
and not on learning outcomes and competencies. This makes it different
from, for example, many current UK vocational qualifications.
The ECTS is easier to operate in a very large and diverse system
but employers and others will have to recognise it for what it
is, a very indirect and imprecise statement of a person's knowledge
and skills. The ECTS should not be used as a qualification entitling
a person to take certain jobs, be admitted to certain courses,
or be paid more for doing the same work as a nominally less qualified
colleague.
19. The solution might appear to be to standardise
programmes so that credits at the same level do reflect more closely
comparable knowledge and skills. Some movement in this direction
would be both possible and desirable, but it would be wrong to
make programmes less fit for purpose in the name of standardisation,
especially when even at level 4 (first cycle university) half
the age group is involved.
20. There is already a wide difference between
courses in the same subject at different UK universities. This
is essential if they are to suit the different students who attend
them and it does not cause serious problems as long as all those
concerned understand the situation.
QUALITY ASSURANCE
SYSTEMS IN
HE (TEACHING AND
RESEARCH): THE
COMPATIBILITY OF
UK PROPOSALS AND
BOLOGNA
21. At all costs we must avoid reintroducing
the intrusive, time-consuming, expensive and (as it turned out)
largely useless scheme that was imposed on the universities in
the recent past.
DEGREE CLASSIFICATION
REFORM IN
LIGHT OF
BOLOGNA
22. The advantage of the degree classification
is that it provides a short and widely understood summary of how
well a student did: "a class X degree in subject Y at university
Z". That is as much information as most employers and others
want to know, and if they need more, they can get it, because
students can obtain detailed transcripts of their record.
23. Over the years, however, courses in
most UK universities have become modular. It has become more and
more difficult to compare the programmes of study of different
students. Student/staff ratios have increased to the point where
examiners cannot be sufficiently confident of their knowledge
of the students to do more than convert marks into classes of
degree by some algorithm. In any case, the great pressure for
transparency has made it difficult for examiners to do anything
else.
24. Degree classification would probably
have been replaced by some form of grade point average even without
Bologna; if there is pressure from Bologna to do this, we should
not oppose it.
December 2006
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